Chemist James Tour debunks abiogenesis claims, calling the "primordial soup" model unfounded and highlighting his nanotech breakthroughs—like light-activated cancer treatments—while rejecting science’s dismissal of religion. A devout Christian, he cites Tacitus and Pliny as evidence for Jesus’ resurrection, arguing faith and science coexist without conflict, even as peers avoid religious debates. His work on molecular motors and transhumanism critiques modern ethical shifts, framing them through biblical prophecy, proving science and religion can align when historical and empirical truths are respected. [Automatically generated summary]
Hi, it's Andrew Clavin, and this is this week's interview with chemist James Torr.
After I interviewed Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute about intelligent design and the possibilities of intelligent design, a lot of people wrote in and said, well, ID may be true, but it's not science.
With respect to the people writing in, I think they're missing the point.
No one is trying to confuse science and religion, but I do think the scientific community has made a concerted effort to do the opposite, to silence religious voices, without which, in my opinion, a lot of science becomes empty and meaningless and even possibly misguided.
Modern science was fashioned by believing Christians like Newton and Galileo who wanted to understand God's world.
Stephen Meyer also of the Discovery Institute has pointed out that the Christian view of God's freedom and reason, the fact that God was free to do whatever he wanted, but also was operating with reason, those two things combine to bring about scientific inquiry because God is free.
The world is contingent.
It could have been other ways, but it was the way God chose to make it.
And because we are made in God's image and share his capacity for reason and an ability to understand some of his actions, we're capable of understanding the choices he made in the mechanics of how his world works.
And that, according to Meyer, and I actually completely agree with this, that those premises led to the scientific religion revolution.
And there's no reason we should feel that these two things are at daggers drawn or that religion and science are opposed to one another.
The prejudice that silences religious voices and censors them and cancels them, that to me is the problem.
It's not any effort.
Nobody's trying to bring back church-approved and church-controlled scientific inquiry.
That effort simply doesn't exist.
James Torr is a good example of what I'm talking about.
He is an American chemist, a nanotechnologist.
He's a professor of chemistry, professor of materials science, and nanoengineering.
We're going to talk about all of that.
He is listed as ISI, highly cited researcher, and he has been accused.
I mean, you can see him online.
He has great videos online, but sometimes you see him arguing with scientists.
I've seen him accused of lying about science in order to smuggle God into the laboratory, but I've never seen anybody make any specific point about how he gets the science wrong.
He's basically being accused for the simple reasons that he challenges scientific orthodoxies and believes in Jesus Christ.
So I want to talk to him today about his work and his beliefs.
Jim, thank you for coming on.
It's good to see you again.
Thank you.
So let's begin with talking about life.
A lot of the interviews I've seen with you, the arguments you've gotten into have been about the beginning of life.
And one of your contentions is that no one knows how life began.
And scientists are basically conning us about that.
Could you explain what you mean by that exactly?
Yes, it's a problem.
We don't know how life began, and we actually never really will know because nobody was there.
But what we can do is we can come up with conjectures on how it might have begun, and then we could try to mimic those in our laboratory and get those to work under laboratory conditions.
We are nowhere close on any one of those points because the simplest living system that we can go after is a cell, and we can compute how simple a cell could be and still survive.
And so these kind of calculations have been done, and we can look at this and we can say, look, we have a lot of trouble just making the basic four classes of compounds.
The lipids, the amino acids and their polymers, which are the polypeptides, the sugars, or sometimes called the saccharides or carbohydrates, and the polysaccharides of those, and then the nucleic acids, which is the DNA and the RNA and the polynucleic acids, the polymers of those.
So just making those four classes is a big problem in the control that we have to do it, and then polymerizing them into their higher order polymeric structures.
Nobody's ever solved that.
So it's a big problem.
And we can't even make the basic units.
And then even if we had them, we can't put together a cell because you can just take a cell.
You can take a cell in your lab and deconstruct it and take out all the pieces and then say, okay, let me put this thing back together again.
Can't be done.
We don't know how to do it.
We wouldn't even know how to do it.
And every year, the target gets further away from us.
So that's what we're up against.
And we just don't know from a scientific standpoint where life came from or how it could have arisen.
Even we don't even know how it could have arisen.
And the world is deceived on this because we've taken surveys and two-thirds of the general public, 80% of those having college education, think that scientists have made life in the lab, simple cells.
Is there a reason they think that?
I mean, were they told that?
Yeah, of course they're told that.
We're all told that.
We're told that molecules were in some primordial soup and those come together and form higher order structures and called a cell.
And those cells come together and form higher order structures and creatures that came out of this primordial soup pond.
And some people would argue, oh, that's not taught anymore.
Actually, the primordial soup model is taught right up into the university and into the postgraduate as the prevailing view on how life came about.
And there's no basis for that.
That's just all made up.
Do we know what life is?
I mean, do we understand?
I mean, when I read about quantum science and forces and all this stuff, it's very confusing to me.
Do we even know what it means for something to be alive?
Well, we certainly have the characteristics of life, so that there are key characteristics.
It breathes, it has a metabolism, it undergoes homeostasis, which means this general internal state where it's operating.
It passes on traits to offspring.
And some people would include in that it evolves, but that's not absolutely necessary to include.
So there are these characteristics of life.
But to define really what life is is a much harder question.
So if you just take the simple experiment where you have a cell and the cell were to just die, try to define what it is that you just lost.
You can see that you've lost certain features of it that were in operation but are no longer.
But what is it that you have just lost?
It's not one simple little thing.
It's this host of things that all stopped working.
And just to define what life is is a very difficult thing.
It's like trying to define consciousness.
It's a difficult thing to define.
So I see you on YouTube and you say these things.
We don't know how life began, which seems to me a simple yes or no question.
Either we do or we don't.
We obviously don't.
And then I see people screaming at you, really angry at you for saying this.
And I saw one guy accuse you of trying to smuggle God into the laboratory and lying about the science.
Why are they so upset?
I mean, so we don't know something.
That seems pretty typical.
Yeah, it's sort of like a religion.
When you can't really defend it, you start shouting and screaming.
And I've done my share of shouting and screaming too.
So I get pretty passionate about this.
But no, what I've always said is that I presume one day we will know.
And I don't know for sure, but I presume we will because I just say, look, if you ask somebody in the year 1700, will we ever have people landing on the moon and coming back?
It would be so foreign to them because they didn't even have flight, let alone space flight.
And they would just think, no, nobody can jump that high.
It can't happen.
But with time, we make these great discoveries.
So I presume one day we'll figure out how to put these things together and make a living cell.
And one day we'll be able to make a valid hypothesis on how a cell might have formed on an early Earth because we'll have a series of experiments.
But what I can tell you is that that day is very far from today.
And the reason I know that is because the complexity of the cell, what we see in a cell, the complexity, we're learning more every year about how complex it is.
And so every year the target is getting further away from us, much further than we are being able to approach it.
So the complexity increases dramatically every decade.
And we're like, wow, I've got to do that.
I've got to do that.
I've got to do that.
So that tells us that we're not near our target.
We're nowhere close.
And that's bothersome to people.
And they say that Tour is speaking God of the gaps.
I don't bring God into this.
I never have.
And again, I'm saying that I presume one day we will get there, but we're far from that today.
And it's just really shaking up the community that I keep saying it.
To be clear about this, if I could send a camera back in time to the moment when life appeared on Earth, is there any moment?
Is there any moment when I would see something that wasn't material, that wasn't somehow a causative action of, you know, material action on something else causing something else to happen?
Is there any moment when a gigantic finger, you know, like painted by Michelangelo would come out of the sky and touch the merck and life would spring forward?
Or would you expect to see whatever happens in the material world to be material?
That's a good question.
I mean, as a scientist, I wouldn't talk about that finger coming forward and doing something magical like that.
But we need some driving force to cause, even if we had all these molecules, to come together in the right arrangement.
And I work in this era of nanotechnology where we try to get many molecules working together to do something in concert.
Very hard to do.
And we do very simple things, nothing like the complexity of a cell.
Not even close, not even in the same universe as far as complexity.
And so you have to say, well, what was it that pushed these things into this right arrangement that they're going to get this?
And then even if you have them in the right arrangement, we don't know how to kickstart the thing to get it going.
What was that spark?
What was that thing that got it going so that cell could begin to go forth?
And some people will say, well, that life came from outer space.
It was seeded here or it landed here on a meteorite.
That doesn't matter.
It's origin of first life.
So if you want to push it to some other planet, go ahead.
But most planets are a lot more harsh than our planet is.
And we've never seen anything out there in any planet that we've looked at.
We've never seen life.
So this is what we're up against.
It's a very difficult thing.
I don't know if you'd see the finger of God doing this.
As a believer in Jesus Christ, certainly I would push in that direction.
But I segregate that from my science.
As a scientist, I could never go in that direction.
So let's talk about the nanotechnology a little bit.
What are you trying to do with nanotechnology?
And what do you think nanotechnology can do?
Oh, man, that's a huge thing.
So we're doing many things.
I mean, one of the areas that we made, you know, we made nano cars, little cars that have four wheels, independently rotating axles, and then we made motors for them.
And it's all one molecule.
It's all one molecule.
And it has a motor.
You shine a light on it, and the motor spins at 3 million rotations per second.
And then we drove these, drove these across surfaces.
And then we just took the motor part and we drilled them into cells to pop holes in the cells to kill them, to kill cancer, to kill superbacteria.
And now we've come up with a whole new generation of these molecules that undergo what's called a plasma.
And so they start vibrating.
And they're running.
So the molecular motors we had run at a million rotations per second.
These are running at a trillion vibrations per second.
And they just plow into cells.
We call them molecular jackhammers.
So we're doing that on the medical front.
And then we've got this whole area of graphene, graphene, this super strong material.
And we found ways to make large amounts of it.
So we have started a company.
It'd be making tons.
Certainly by the fall, it'd be at the tons scale.
And so it's going into concrete, it's going to wood composites.
And so it's strengthening that.
And it's a naturally occurring compound.
So you don't have to worry about us introducing new material into our universe.
It's all naturally occurring.
It's just that now we can get at it much more cheaply.
And we're turning trash, household waste.
You just flash it.
And in less than a second, it turns into graphene.
So it can go into building material.
Remediating soil with these nanotechnologies.
We're making batteries with these nanotechnologies.
So it covers a wide area.
Nano reaches from electronics to biology through chemistry through physics.
It reaches into all these areas.
So just so I'm clear, when you say you're making a car, this one molecule, you're not talking about like an egg-sized molecule.
You're talking about like a tiny little molecule.
Yeah, you can't see them.
You can see them with what's called the scanning, tunneling, and microscope.
Then you can see them.
And we've seen them drive across surfaces.
We've made nano-dragsters with big rear wheels, small front wheels, and they kind of pop a wheelie as they get going.
This is true.
I mean, we've published papers on this.
And so this is all in the literature now.
And we've competed in the nano car races.
There are nanocar races.
They never let us use our motorized versions.
They just want to use electric field gradients.
The motorized ones move much, much faster.
And yeah, they're all single molecules.
Starting to See Nano00:04:35
You can't see them.
And we make a billion, billion of them at a time.
Wow.
You guys have all the fun.
You're sitting around having molecule races.
Now, this puts forward the idea that you could ultimately inject some kind of unseen Pac-Man into a human body and he could work on cancerous cells or improve human life in some way.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
And people worry about this.
What if it gets away from us?
So the ones we make, you have to shine a light on them, a very intense light, and they're directed to a certain area of the body or a certain cell type.
And so you have this double safety mechanism.
They go to the cells of interest, and then you have to, we activate ours with light.
So you have to have an intense light sort.
Just walking out in the sunlight isn't going to do it.
So they're actually more selective than typical drugs, which always have off-target effects.
And yeah, these are little machines that are going to go in and that are going in.
I mean, we're doing animal experiments right now.
They've never been used in people, but certainly we use them in rodents.
And we knock out cancer, we knock out super bacteria, and it's a very big deal.
So it's a new mechanism to fight disease.
So one of the things that I've noticed is happening recently is I talk to people who are not religious believers, and they're starting to use religious language.
They're starting to say, oh, this is demonic, or this looks like the end of days.
And what they're usually talking about is this kind of transhuman idea, this idea that we've started with transgenderism, that you can magically turn yourself from man to female, but really, and I just finished a book called From Transgender to Transhuman, which wasn't a very good book, but it makes this sort of argument that transgenderism is just the beginning of how we're all going to become, we can download our consciousness into computers and all this stuff.
And it does feel to me like we're going to be faced with a choice between being human and being something else.
Do you foresee that?
Do you foresee like an issue coming forward where there's a difference between, say, improving someone's intelligence or fixing a mind that doesn't work and actually ceasing to be what we now think of as being human, becoming homo deus, as one writer put it?
Well, I certainly see the same sort of thing where you see this speaking by scientists.
They'll say, wow, that is design.
They're starting to use this term designed.
And I never use that term when I'm speaking about science, but it's so overwhelming.
There's people that are saying that and even writing that.
Now, as far as improving humans and improving intelligence, I think there's certainly the possibility of that.
You know, I've long wondered why I have to go into this classroom every year and like Aristotle still speak things out and students are sitting there taking notes and trying to learn this.
It would be great if I could just do a direct wireless download.
You know, you pay your $100,000 and you got your download and you got your education.
It'd be a great way to go.
I'm not sure that we're exactly there yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if we will be able to transfer information into the brain as we understand more about it in manners like this.
Certainly AI has got everybody's interest.
And I've also long wanted to test things on the Turing test and to see, can I speak to a computer and it speaks to me back and I can't even tell it's a computer.
And I've practiced on Amazon at home to speak to Amazon and have these conversations with Amazon.
It was never very good.
I could clearly tell that this was not a human yet.
But with AI coming forward, it's getting better and better.
So I don't know, but if I take my scientist hat off and I put on my believer hat, I've already read to the end of the Bible.
So I know how the world is going to go.
I know how it's going to end.
AI might certainly be a part of that imagery that's written about in the book of Revelation.
It might certainly be a part, but the end of all things is going to come because of the wickedness of man and an Antichrist coming forward.
Maybe that Antichrist is a big AI computer, but everybody is going to be drawn to that Antichrist.
Belief Beyond Evidence00:06:04
So it gives me great comfort and I understand and I take great peace in the fact that I've read to the end of the book many times and I know how it ends and I know who's victorious in the end and that's Jesus, the Son of God.
And when he comes, everything gets restored and I'm so glad I'm on his side.
Well, that's the last thing I want to talk about.
I'm glad you're on his side too, and I'm glad I'm on his side.
And I completely agree with you, but I do wonder, you're working with the smallest components that we can get our fingers on.
You're working with the tiniest parts of life.
You're dealing with the very makeup of life.
And you believe, as I believe, that Jesus Christ rose from the dead.
Is there anything in your religious belief that is challenged by your scientific belief or vice versa?
Never.
There has never been, I came to the Lord at the age of 18 from a secular Jewish home, I think very much like you, and in New York City.
And so I came to the Lord before I was a scientist.
I was 18.
I was just studying chemistry in college.
And there has never been anything that I have learned in science that is a fact that contests with something in the Bible.
I've just not seen it.
The Bible certainly has imagery.
The Bible is tough to interpret in certain portions, like the early chapters in Genesis.
And there is a lot of scientific theories that might contest, but theories come and go.
I mean, every decade you have these theories come forth and they go.
But what is scientific fact?
I've never seen a problem.
So that's never bothered me and I've never had any problem with it.
But I stay very close to the Lord.
You know, I've read the Bible every day of my life for 45 years.
And so it's very much a part of me.
And it's very much what I like.
And Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.
This is a clear scriptural evidence.
And there's other historical evidence.
You can read the writings of people that weren't Christian friendly.
Tacitus, Trajan, Pliny the Younger.
These weren't Christian-friendly people.
And they're writing about these people that worship Jesus as if he's alive.
And these first century Christians, they were not dying for what they believed to be true.
You and I would die for what we believe to be true.
They were dying for what they knew to be true because they saw it with their own eyes.
And nobody dies for what they know to be a lie.
And these men, these women, and even these children were dying for what they knew to be true because they saw Jesus alive.
Paul says there's over 500 people at one time saw him.
People can hallucinate, but hallucinations are never shared.
And you have 500 people seeing him at one time.
So you look at this and it stacks up the historical evidence that Jesus has risen from the dead.
And that is the foundation of our faith.
So absolutely, I believe this.
This is outside the realm of science.
Science itself declares it can't make an assessment on this because it's outside the realm of science.
So it's something that science itself can't measure.
It's like dark matter.
Science has no way, even though dark matter is like 70% of our universe is dark matter and dark energy.
If you add in dark energy as well, that would be like 90% of the matter in our universe.
We have no tool to detect it.
We can't see it.
We can't detect it with any tool, but we know it's there because of difference.
And so there are many things that we can't assess with science.
I think one day we'll figure out the dark matter thing.
But yeah, from a clear historical evidence, Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.
No doubt in my mind about that.
So then why do these people get so angry?
Like I don't understand this myself.
If someone who is operating at your extraordinarily high level can believe in that and also believe in the things that you see scientifically as you do, what's their problem?
And I don't mean for you to talk to them, but they yell at you all the time.
I'm just wondering what it is that they say to you that makes them so upset.
Well, you know, I'm not sure.
I'm not sure, Andrew.
I'm not sure.
I mean, I'm generally fairly mild-mannered.
I mean, I can get riled up.
But what I have found, you know, if I go a week, Andrew, without having a one-on-one conversation where I've seen a person with my own eyes right in front of me go from not believing in the physical resurrection to believing in the physical resurrection, it's a very down week for me.
Almost every week.
Yeah, almost every week in a one-on-one conversation.
And the vast majority of people that I speak with are highly educated because this is the environment in which I work.
Professors, students, physicians.
I mean, this is where I work.
And I see it every week.
I mean, last week it was five people.
And so all in one-on-one conversation.
So I see it all the time.
If I just go through the facts, the basic understanding of this, the heart is touched.
And I see it over and over again.
So when I get people alone and I take them through this, after 40 minutes, I've seen them go from not believing to believing over and over again.
Wow.
Wow.
That's amazing.
And yet these scientists who get so upset with you, are they afraid of, do you think they're afraid of losing something?
Are they afraid of losing the scientific method?
Or is there something, you know, they always go back to Galileo and the Pope and, you know, he's shown the instruments.
But that's a very complicated story.
And really, just because somebody did something wrong doesn't prove anything.
What are they afraid of losing?
Well, first of all, they got the Galileo story all wrong.
Yes, I know.
But, you know, most of them don't even engage with me one-on-one.
They don't even engage.
What I say in the university is if you speak up a little bit about Jesus Christ, they'll attack you.
But if you speak up a lot, they just leave you alone.
I mean, they just don't want to get you started.
Engaging Conversations Unveiled00:01:23
That's really interesting, yeah.
So most of them don't want to engage.
But when someone inquires, when someone says, hey, why is it you believe this?
You know, tell me about this.
Then boom, I set up a time.
I meet with them.
I say, I need one hour of your time.
And within that hour, I would say 90% of the people that I speak with one-on-one that have asked to hear this from me, to hear this story, come around to believing in the resurrection because I think the truth of the resurrection has been written on the heart of human beings.
And when God has touched the heart, I'm just bringing them to a point of confess what's already there.
I see it with scientists and engineers all the time.
Every week, I see it with scientists and engineers all the time.
Wow.
I want to know your secret because I think that's an amazing thing in and of itself.
So your stuff is available on YouTube.
It's T-O-U-R Jamestour.
You do Bible studies and you do science.
It's great, great material.
I hope people will check it out.
It's great talking to you.
I hope you'll come back and talk again.
Really interesting.
Thank you.
And the YouTube channel is DR James Tour.
So if you just went to YouTube, DR Jamestour, it'll come up.